The first issue of Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine was published in 2002. What started as a flimsy flier has since grown into a company that boasts an award-winning magazine and creative haus with clients bust over 150 pages and are read world-wide by many thousands of people. At the start, we wrote about what we knew.
Our editorial focuses on engaging, eclectic content designed for a demographic of common interest: those who are impassioned and interested in the lifestyles, passions and pastimes synonymous with mountain landscapes. We tell these stories with a keen attention to detail, incorporating award-winning writing, design, illustration and photography. It’s this process that fuels our creative fire–telling the stories that define and influence mountain culture, both in our regional locations and abroad.
We knew about the mountains in our backyard, the spectacular Kootenay region of interior British Columbia. Home to the birth of commercial backcountry skiing in North America, some of the world’s most accomplished mountain athletes and pioneers, as well as some of the most spectacular wilderness on the planet, it was a great place to start.
Today we publish two bi-annual print magazines (Coast Mountain Culture Magazine is our other title) with a distribution of over 40,000 copies per print run. As a surprise to many of our readers, our magazines are free. If you’ve ever felt the paper weight and seen the print quality of our publications, you might also be surprised. But it’s a distribution strategy that works. You’ll often see us displayed prominently in fine outdoor retail shops, or in the lobby of backcountry lodges. We don’t compete for newsstand space in 7-Eleven’s or Safeway’s, no, we get our magazines straight to the people who count. As a result, we’ve won numerous awards, but more importantly, we are ravenously read by the people who matter–those who are actively participating in outdoor culture. Not to mention, our magazines are designed to survive the rigors of the mountains. It stands the test of time in high alpine outhouses. And that’s no easy task!
With the Mountain Culture Group we are bringing all of the thousands of stories we’ve published over the last decade plus and bring them under one roof. All the excellence in design, storytelling, photography and illustration made available online.
